Jim Caviezel, the actor who took the film world by surprise with his moving depiction of Christ in 2004, said this week that abortion has nothing to do with helping women and that he is willing to risk his career to say so.

Caviezel gave an interview with the US magazine Catholic Digest, in which he spoke about the challenge he received from a colleague to adopt a disabled child as a demonstration of his well-publicized pro-life stand. Earlier this year Caviezel adopted his second child – a five-year-old girl with a brain tumour from the Guangzhou region of China.

Reflecting on the 51.5 million surgical abortions to date in the US since Roe v. Wade, Caviezel began by saying, "I was listening to Johnny Mathis the other day and I said, ‘What an amazing voice’. I have yet to hear another person sound like Johnny Mathis.

"Look, I am for helping women. I just don’t see abortion as helping women. And I don’t love my career that much to say, ‘I’m going to remain silent on this’. I’m defending every single baby who has never been born. And every voice that would have been unique like Johnny Mathis’s. How do we know that we didn’t kill the very child who could have created a particular type of medicine that saves other lives?"

Caviezel told interviewer Julie L. Rattey that the Christian is obliged to act in accordance with his faith, regardless of the risks. He compared the injustice of abortion to that of the mistreatment of women in some Arab countries.

Caviezel’s latest film, "The Stoning of Soraya M," released in June this year, is based on a novel that purports to tell the true story of a woman stoned to death on a trumped up charge of adultery in modern Iran. The novel’s author, the late journalist Fereydoune Sahebjam, was dedicated to exposing injustices in Iran under the Islamic regime.

"The man who wrote this book chose to get involved in something that cost him his entire life. There were many a bully who went after him. They had been hunting this man down for years."

"When you go to church on Sunday, it’s absolutely worthless unless you apply what you’ve learned to your everyday life. What I hope they take away is the same story Jesus tried to tell years ago, which was the Good Samaritan. At some point, we all play a character in the Bible. We all think of ourselves, Oh, I’m Peter. I’m Paul. I’m John. I’m Jesus (laughs).

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